Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
In 1929 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Ernest Hemingway that because his short stories now earned $4000 a pop he was "an old whore" who had "mastered the 40 positions" when "in her youth one was enough." But were the upwards of 180 stories he cranked out when not writing The Great Gatsby really the work of a literary prostitute selling out his talent for a fast buck? Kirk Curnutt and Robert Trogdon don't think so. Each episode they draw a random title from a hat and explore its place in Fitzgerald's career, in the magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post or Esquire where it may have appeared, and in the overall development of the American short story. Along the way, they talk literary politics, history, and gossip from the 1920s and 1930s, rediscovering the lively personalities and rivalries that tried to define the porous boundaries between commercial and artistic fiction, between the popular and the avant-garde, between the forgotten and the canonized.
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
He Thinks He's Wonderful
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We kick off season 2 of Master the 40 with our first foray into the series of "juveniles" Fitzgerald wrote for the Saturday Evening Post between 1928 and 1931. Actually, he wrote two coming-of-age series for the magazine, one about a boy (Basil Duke Lee) and one about a girl (Josephine Perry). The latter tend to be darker and sadder, while the former offer nostalgic glimpses of Fitzgerald's own adolescence in St. Paul in the 1910s. Chronologically, "He Thinks He's Wonderful" is the fourth of eight Basil stories and captures our hero smackdab in the middle of the awkward age. We explore Fitzgerald's treatment of American teenagers before they became rebels without a cause. On the one hand, the author's empathy for young people led him to depict the foibles of growing up with far more psychological realism than predecessors such as Booth Tarkington. At the same time, the Basil series eschews the "fall from innocence" vision of coming of age modernist contemporaries shared, which insisted that some kind of epiphany would mercilessly and irrevocably initiate young people into the hypocrisies and compromises of adulthood, forever denying them their prelapsarian naivete. In the end, Basil is no Holden Caulfield ... but he just may be a more honest depiction of adolescence, an intense but ultimately transitory stage of the life cycle. No matter how much American popular culture glamorizes the teen years, most of us are happy never to go back to that age!